1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to automated accounting systems and, in particular to accounting systems for handling agency transactions.
2. Background Information
In many countries postal systems include locally owned or franchised post offices that allow customers to perform various third party, or agency, transactions such as acquiring government licenses, e.g., driving licenses and fishing licenses, paying utility bills, cable TV bills, and so forth, registering cars, renewing insurance, and also certain banking transactions, such as money transfers. For each agency transaction, the postal system receives a commission from the agency and, in the case of franchised post offices, the postal system also pays the franchise owner a commission. In some transactions, a fee is collected from the customer directly, such as a fee for a money transfer transaction, and the fee must also be settled among postal system, local post office, the franchise owner, and the agency. There is thus a complex settlement process for every agency transaction, and the process may differ not only by agency, but also within agency accounts by transaction type. Further, certain agency transactions must be settled immediately with the agency. For example, a customer paying an electric bill requires an immediate acknowledgement from the electric company that the bill is paid.
The commissions are calculated in various ways depending on the agency. The commissions may be paid as fees per transaction, percentages of respective transactions, percentages of total transactions over a given period, percentages of collected customer fees, and so forth. Accordingly, the postal system must keep track of all transactions and the associated commission payment rules to determine what is owed to the system by the various agencies and what is owed to the post offices and/or franchise owners.
To further complicate the agency transactions process, the customers may pay for the transactions with cash, credit card, check and/or other financial instruments, such as vouchers. The non-cash transactions present some amount of risk for the local post office and the franchise owner, particularly for those transactions that must be settled immediately with the agency, because the non-cash methods of payment may not be immediately verifiable. If the non-cash method of payment ends up being false, the post office or the franchise owner remains responsible for a payment to the agency.
Each local post office requires, for handling the agency transactions and local transactions such as item purchases, point of sale equipment, such as a cash register, a credit card acceptance device and a post office transaction register. Each local post office accumulates the agency transaction information using the post office transactions register and provides the transaction data to a central data store, which we refer to herein as a “correspondence server subsystem.” The correspondence server subsystem manages the accumulated data for all of the local post offices and provides transaction information, in appropriate formats, to the respective agencies. Thus, the correspondence server subsystem reports bank transactions to the various banks in bank-dictated formats, insurance transactions to the various insurance companies in the appropriate formats for each of the companies, transactions to utility companies in the appropriate formats, and so forth. Further, the correspondence server subsystem necessarily processes the transaction data for each agency separately.
The correspondent server subsystem also provides information relating to all of the transactions to a general ledger at the postal system, for accounting and reconciliation purposes. The postal system and the various agencies then have to determine the commissions payable to the postal office system and to the franchise owners. Transaction settlement operations are also performed at appropriate times to settle cash and non-cash payments to the respective agencies and the remunerations, that is, the commissions, fees and so forth to the postal system, and franchise owners.
The transactions that require immediate settlement must be acknowledged as individual transactions, which involves transmitting the transaction data for each such transaction to the appropriate agency in the requisite format and the agency, in turn, acknowledging the transactions. The local post office thus sends the transaction data for the individual transactions through the correspondence server subsystem, which produces the individual transaction records in the appropriate formats for the particular agencies and provides the data to the agencies. The agencies then process the transaction and provide the appropriate acknowledgements and commission reconciliation information to the postal office system for each such transaction.
The entire accounting process is time consuming and complex, as well as expensive to operate. The local post offices have, regardless of the number of agency transaction performed, the overhead of owning or renting the post office transaction register, as well as the credit card acceptance device and cash registers for handling the cash or non-cash payments for the agency transactions and also purely local transactions. Thus, the local operation has a relatively high equipment overhead. Further, the local post offices have as overhead operating through the postal system accounting system, which operates hardware and software that collects the agency transaction data provided by all of the local post offices and separately processes the transaction data by agency and also in the aggregate to report to the various agencies and the general ledger.